


Fidelis

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Insomnia, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Road Trips, post-season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 19:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14983565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: fidelis: (1) loyal, trustworthy, (2) a trusted confidantLance, learning to be both.With the deepest of apologies to Derrida





	Fidelis

**Author's Note:**

> What this fic does not do:  
> \--attempt to navigate the socio-political clusterfuck the vld universe is in post-s6  
> \--address the logistics of interstellar travel sans wormholes  
> \--dwell in any sort of detail on the fascinating questions of cultural exchange in late-to-collapse stage empire
> 
> What this fic does do:  
> \--get my feelings about season six all over the fucking place
> 
> WELP

_“o philoi, oudeis philoi”_  
\--attributed to Aristotle

Lance doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Well, that’s not, exactly, correct. He knows what he’s doing in the rather immediate sense—conducting the universe’s weirdest grocery run with Hunk’s messily annotated list in one hand, their pooled GAC in the other, and the really unfortunately placed faith of his peers on his shoulders. But in the larger, more inter-galactic sense, he has not a fucking clue what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know how to form the question of what he _ought_ to be doing.

“Paladin?” He snaps his gaze up to the vendor who watches him with something approaching concern in their multifractal eyes, and, damn, are they really pretty when the light of the twin moons hits them right. “Are you well?”

Lance opens up his mouth, trusting in his innate capacity for bullshit to see him through, and is as surprised as anyone when the truth pops out: “I don’t know.”

The vendor makes a sound in the back of its throat that’s the unholy cross between a glottal stop and a burp. Lance figures it must be what passes as a thoughtful noise for this species. They shrug with two of their four arms. “It is a trying time,” they say. “For all of us. But if you handle the miqu’ia fruit like that I will be forced to charge you as you will certainly crush it.”

His hand spasms around the large plum looking thing he’d been contemplating and only saves it from splattering all over the floor with some quick acrobatics that probably look really, really dumb. But he gets it back up and holds it out to the vendor.

“Shit!” he blurts out, he’s really batting a thousand today. “I’m sorry.”

This gets him a slow and thoughtful sigh. The vendor gently closes his hand over the fruit and pats it with one of its lower arms. “No,” they say in that same slow and thoughtful tone. “You should keep it. Miqu’ia is good for the wounded and distracted soul.”

He wants to snort at that, ‘cause if there’s anything that his soul is _not_ , it’s wounded or distracted, thanks much. But he pauses mid-thought. 

“Yeah?” He asks. “How’s that?”

The team doesn’t need a repeat of the entire fiasco with the semi-hallucinogenic space oranges that’d reduced Pidge to talking to a bulkhead wall for three hours, but if this thing is _actually_ useful. Well.

“I am delighted you asked, Paladin,” chirrups the vendor. There’s a brief flurry of movement as they gesture with all four arms—its an impressive display of coordination. Lance is pretty amazed they hadn’t, like, smacked themselves in the face. He discretely thumbs on his coms as they launch into an inspired rant on the medicinal properties of the neon yellow fruit.

“Huh,” he says slowly. “Thank you.”

The vendor beams at him with both their mouths. “Of course, we remember Naxzela.”

Lance swallows hard and nods. Naxzela is not a thing he likes to be reminded of. He pulls his collar up once the vendor moves on to help another potential customer. “Pidge?”

“Yeah, verifying it now,” comes her voice over the coms all tinny, and he thinks she sounds tired. They’re all tired. “Yeah, okay, that thing is like a super food that farming conglomerates back home would collectively jizz themselves into a coma over. Get as many as you can.”

“Gross, Pidgeon,” he mutters, and she laughs at him. 

The vendor is very kind when he tries to negotiate them down into his (alarmingly meager, being a Defender of the Universe is not a paying gig) budget. “Here, Paladin,” they say gently as they pick up one of the fruits. “Let me show you how to peel and prepare it for best effect.”

He watches with intensity and makes sure his coms can pick up every word. It’s not that complicated, but Lance fucks up a lot of things, and they don’t really have the resources for him to be fucking up any more. He startles when the vendor offers him a piece, juices dripping down one of it’s arms, the flesh almost glowing in the dying light. 

It tastes unholy sweet.

Hunk doesn’t argue with him when he separates out the little bag of miqu’ia fruits when he gets back. Pidge eyes him thoughtfully for a moment, tiny furrow between her brows, but she remains silent when he walks off.

Shiro is sitting propped up on one of Black’s paws, head tilted back to rest against her struts, eyes closed. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain, but Lance has (finally, with difficulty) learned that really doesn’t mean fucking anything at all when it comes to Takashi Shirogane. He looks at the bag of fruit and thinks about presenting it to him. Thinks about showing him how to peel them open and crack the spine to release the quintessence-laced juice. Thinks about telling him all the things he learned from the vendor.

Then he turns around and finds Keith. 

“I don’t have a lot of free time, Lance,” Keith says when Lance finally tracks him down (honestly, way harder than it should have been, given there’s only nine of them not counting the animals) to where he’s hunched over some tech with Krolia that Lance can’t make heads nor tails of.

Lance thrusts the bag of fruits at him and Keith drags in a slow breath like he’s counting backwards from ten—in multiple languages. “They’re for Shiro,” he says, and he can see the second that derails Keith. It’s in the way his eyes flicker from Lance’s face to the bag and back. “They’re, like, a type of super fruit with naturally occurring quintessence in them,” he says. “Pidge confirmed that they are good for, I don’t know, headaches, helping with healing.” Lance looks Keith dead in the eye. “Memory loss.”

Keith takes the bag and nods thoughtfully. “All of them?”

Lance shrugs. 

He watches as Keith carefully bundles the bag against his chest as if it’s a child or something impossibly precious. “Thanks,” Keith says softly.

“Here,” Lance says. “This is how to peel them.”

///

 _…und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal die freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt_  
_“Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!” So rief der sterbende Weise;_  
_“Freunde, es gibt keine Feind!” ruf ich, der lebend Tor._  
\--Nietzsche, _Human, All Too Human_

None of them are sleeping well. Which shouldn’t come as a big fucking shock to anyone with a half way functional brain and a sense of empathy—Lance is pretty sure he has at least one of those, though some days he wonders—given what they’ve been through. All of them have nightmares, fits of insomnia, weird waking dreams that aren’t quite flashbacks but aren’t hallucinations either. Basically, all of them have PTSD now like G-d decided to hand it out like the worst party trick ever.

But Allura, being the overachieving princess that she is, takes it to an entirely new and alarming level.

Blue prods him out his restless dreams of falling into an endless void of twisting white light. She presses a sense of urgency against his skull so heavy he can feel it weight against his tongue like bitter fruit, nearly choking him. She runs a feeling of desperation up his spine like clawing fingers and he swings himself awkwardly onto his feet.

“All right,” he mutters under his breath. “I’m going.”

“Lance?” Pidge murmurs from her nest of blankets. Her head pops up, hair a wild mess of curls, and she blinks sleepily at him.

He flaps dismissive hand at her. “Gotta pee.”

Pidge peers at him for a moment longer before flopping back down with a tongue click. From the other side of the fire he can see Shiro’s eyes gleam in the darkness. They look at each other for a long moment before Shiro turns his head against Keith’s shoulder and, Lance hopes, goes back to sleep.

Blue plucks at his mind with worried fingers and Lance turns away.

It’s not hard to figure out where Allura’s gone in her sleepless wandering. He climbs Blue on muscle memory, hands finding grips along her forelegs blind, he’d know how to climb her after he’s forgotten everything else. Blue urges him on wordlessly, her worry blending into his worry, creating a vast, swirling singularity of stress upon which no man could look and remain unchanged.

Or something. It’s late and he’s not been sleeping well. If his internal narration is slipping towards incoherent flights of purple prose, well, fuck you for saying anything.

Allura’s sitting smack between Blue’s ears, knees drawn up under her chin, hair a mess of tangling curls down her back. She doesn’t blink when he drops into an easy cross-legged seat next to her.

“You’re stressing out Blue,” he says with a yawn and apropos fucking nothing. They’ve done this particular song and dance enough times that they don’t need any run up.

Allura makes a face—all scrunched up indignation and annoyance. “She’s a tattletale.”

“Yup,” he agrees easily. He’s learned that Blue is just as willing to tattle on him when he’s having bad nights and she is to tattle on Allura. Lance is endlessly grateful that Red seems to feel zero compunction towards any similar bullshit. He’s pretty sure he couldn’t deal with that.

Allura presses her face into her knees and says nothing in response.

Lance leans back on his hands and stares up at the sweep of unfamiliar stars. They’re following a path plotted out by Pidge based on algorithms and math that’s frankly way above Lance’s meager B in differential calculus. He doesn’t know where they are and he’s not real sure where they’ve been, but he trusts Pidge to lead them home the way he trusts that his mama will be there with churros and torticas de moran and roughly a million things to say about him disappearing (literally) off the face of the planet. 

The spill of stars is pretty above them and he can wait.

It’s been slow, and it’s been painful, but Lance is learning how to wait.

“It’s stupid,” Allura mutters into her knees.

“There’s a lot of things that are stupid,” he says. “Keith’s hair is still stupid, and I don’t care who hears me say it even though he is our brave leader now and everything. The way Pidge always has to break cookies into exactly four pieces before she’ll eat them is stupid. Hunk’s complete refusal to teach me how to make booze is stupid.” Lance shrugs. “The way I can’t sleep for more than two hours is stupid. The way I keep hearing him scream is stupid. There’s a lot of stupid.”

Allura hiccups out a little laugh. They both ignore how wet the sound is around the edges. “I miss him,” she says, her voice so small he has to lean towards her to catch it. “He tried to kill us, and I miss him.”

Lance blows out a slow breath. They’d been dancing around this particular conversation for more nights than he really wants to think about.

“Well,” he says carefully. “You loved him.”

Allura turns to look at him, cheek still pressed against her knees. “I didn’t,” she says, and Lance’s heart picks up a little with vicious hopefulness, which is a horrifying disgrace on his heart’s part and not _even remotely the time, fuck_. Allura sighs and Lance mentally smacks himself back to attention. “I could have, though.”

Lance chews on his lip and nods—pretends to be thoughtful when he’s just buying for time so when he does finally open up his mouth nothing ragingly stupid pops out. “Dude was an intergalactic Prince and charming as all hell. I’d’ve fucked him.”

Well. Shit. Step one spectacularly failed.

Allura stares at him for a long time before sputtering out a disbelieving little laugh. “You hated him!”

He shrugs. “Princess, I am also, if it hasn’t escaped your notice, an incredibly petty asshole. My opinions on anyone should never be given any sort of weight.”

“You were right,” she says into her knees, but even all squashed up and wet around the edges he can hear how her voice breaks. “In the end.”

“Outlier,” he says easily. “And should not be counted.”

At this Allura finally dissolves into giggles. They’re a little high-pitched and have the sharp edge of hysterics to them, but it’s still giggles and not tears, so he’ll take them and ask for more, sir, if you’d be so kind. He blows out a breath and carefully puts a hand on her back. Allura shudders, her entire body quaking with the force of it. When he starts to move away she makes a low, dissenting noise in the back of her throat with her face still pressed into her knees. 

Lance breathes in on a four count and carefully rubs a hand along her spine. She melts into it and his heart goes soft and squishy with hopeless affection that he honestly has no idea what to do with. It’s a horrible, terrible mess and if it was anyone else he’d laugh his jackass head off, but it’s him and—and this is the important part he’d like to note—it’s _her_.

So, he sits on top of Blue’s cold head and rubs a hand along Allura’s back while they both ignore how she cries.

///

“Friendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself. Hence it says, saying this to itself, that there are no more friends, it avows itself in avowing that. Friendship tells the truth—and this is always better left unknown.”  
\--Derrida, _The Politics of Friendship_

He’s halfway through his assigned tasks for the evening—everybody has their little jobs when they make camp each night, every time a different planet like the worst intergalactic road trip ever—when a prickling along his spine makes him look up.

Pidge is watching him with sharp, thoughtful eyes. 

This is not particularly surprising. Pidge watches _everything_ with that carefully assessing gaze. It’s just how she’s hardwired—all parts geared towards suspicion and analysis. She’s a livewire worked into the form of a teenaged girl with more energy than any three other people you care to pick packed into significantly less than a person of matter. If it weren’t for Voltron, Lance realizes with a start, she’d be a mess: twitchy, paranoid, burning through life like it was so much dry kindling, vibrating always just a fraction out of sync with the universe around her, just a sliver too fast. But inside the framework of Voltron she’s drawn into focus. She’s learned to take that shiver of her atoms and channel it into something beyond herself and it makes her shine.

Still. It’s a bit much to be the center of all that trembling energy.

“Sup?” He says by way of greeting and demand.

Pidge runs her tongue along the front of her teeth and sighs. “What are you doing?”

“Like, in the immediate sense or in the cosmic sense?” He asks. “Cause in the immediate sense I’m sitting here counting out these sweet pods of---”

“ _Lance_ ,” Pidge says.

He sighs. “Gonna need more context, Pidgeon.”

“You’re a mess,” Pidge tells him, like he doesn’t know that he hasn’t done his skin routine in weeks and is probably courting the biggest break out this side of the Milky Way. 

“Rude,” he says. “I mean, truthful, but you didn’t need to go out and say it.”

She shoves his shoulder, a hard little jab right to the joint, and he curls away from her whining piteously. Keith looks up from where he’s doing something probably deeply important and serious and leader-ly with an arched eyebrow. Pidge gives him a hard, flat look until he turns away.

“Okay, flyboy,” Pidge says. “Spit it out.”

He gives her a narrow, squint-eyed look. “Again, Pidgeon, I need more context.”

Pidge nudges the bundles of flash-dried food that Hunk had set him to divvying out amongst the lions to sit beside him. She pokes his temple, frowning slightly, and pushes hard with her fingers. He tilts his head into it when she continues to frown at him. “You’ve got something building up there, some dumb idea,” she says, and then folds her arms. “So, tell me before you actually commit to the stupid and get yourself killed.”

“Damn, love the vote of confidence going on there,” he says. “It is, in fact, possible that I could have an idea that is, one, not stupid, and, two, not going to get me killed.”

“Extensive modeling suggests this probability is so close to zero as to be statistically insignificant,” she replies with a grin, which fades quickly into a look of unsettling seriousness. “We’re going home,” Pidge says plaintively. “Please don’t do anything stupid until we get home.”

Now that is an easy one. He holds up a hand in one loose fist for her to bump. “I solemnly promise to not commit to any stupid plans before we get home.”

But Pidge is smart. She’s _so_ smart—she sees through all his bullshit pretty much all the time, but all she says is: “Lance,” all squashed up and sad. 

He’s not sure if there’d be another argument, or if she’d let it be until she had more data—formulated a precise line of attack to obliterate his objections and defenses—because an indistinct shout drags their attention off each other to the center of the camp. They sigh in sync.

Allura stands trembling, her hands clenched in tight fists, while Keith glowers down at her, arms crossed over his chest. Pidge wraps one small hand around his wrist and squeezes hard—a silent warning, and one he’s almost certainly going to ignore.

“Yo,” he calls, all lazy indifference and callous _jeu d’esprit_. “I know roughing it is hard and all, but you are both very pretty.” He pauses to dramatically overthink the statement and then grins. “Of course, not as pretty as me.”

Allura gives him an exasperated smile but tangles her fingers with his for a moment when he slouches up beside her. Keith literally presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose like Lance just gave him a spontaneous migraine. Like, for real, that’s the gesture he does, and Lance doesn’t know whether or not to be proud that he’s managed to produce that in under thirty seconds or disappointed in Keith’s predictability. 

“Lance,” Keith says lowly. “I don’t need you adding to this mess.”

Allura stiffens beside him. “Don’t snap at him,” she warns. “He hasn’t done anything.”

Keith drops his hand to glower at both of them—the shadows under his eyes are almost the same colour as his hair—and makes a small, vicious gesture with one hand. “No. He hasn’t. That’s kinda the point isn’t it?” Keith says, and his voice is perfectly flat. There’s no malice in it, he could be noting the fact that Red’s primary colour scheme is, well, red. “He doesn’t really do anything, but at least he hasn’t actually made things worse—unlike with you and Lotor. How many of those ships did you make for him without even asking yourself _once_ what he was going to do with them?”

Allura makes a soft, inhuman sound of pain before spinning on one heel and walking away. Coran reaches for her and she jerks from him, hands up, shaking her head. No one says anything as she disappears into the alien underbrush on the far side of Blue.

“Dude,” Hunk says softly and Keith curls in on himself just a little.

Something high and ringing fills Lance’s ears, the sound of a distant claxon maybe, and the world seems to move very slowly when he turns back to Keith. Lance’s smiling. He can feel it stretch his face all sharp and painful. It’s not a very nice smile. 

“Yeah man, fuck her for believing the guy who killed Zarkon,” he says. Keith jerks and stares at him. “Fuck her for trusting the guy who helped her unlock her abilities that—not to put too fine a point on it—saved the life of your boyfriend.” Keith backs up as Lance gets right in his space, chin angled up and spoiling for a fight. “Fuck the girl who has had literally everything taken from her: parents, friends, home, culture, _her entire fucking planet_.”

Keith’s watching him with wide eyes like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. “Yeah, man,” Lance says again, and he knows exactly how crass and unkind he’s being. But Keith’s always been an easy target and with each fresh cruelty he curls in on himself just a little more like a kicked dog. “Fuck the girl that wanted, just for a little while, to believe everything she’s ever known wasn’t completely gone.” He pulls back and throws his arms wide. “You aren’t the only orphan in the room, Dear Leader!” Lance lets himself turn his gaze unsubtly to where Krolia and Shiro stand watching their little melodrama with expressions he can’t read. “Oh wait,” he says soft as kitten fur. “You aren’t even the sad little orphan anymore, are you?”

“ _Lance!_ ” Hunk’s voice cuts through the swirl cold rage that eats him from the inside out like some sort of insidious bacteria made of stress, guilt, and directionless fury.

Pidge has both her hands wrapped around his arm, her face pressed against his shoulder as she mutters: “Shut up, shut up, shut up, _shut up_.”

There's a wet sheen to her eyes and she's shaking, a fine tremor of her limbs, where she holds him. Lance curls around her to block her trembling form from view. He can hear everyone else moving, but for the moment it’s just him and his Pidgeon as she grips his arm so hard he can feel his fingers go numb and tingling. “Sorry,” he mutters into the wild mess of her hair. “Sorry.”

Pidge presses their foreheads together where they stand curled together. “Just shut up,” she whispers back.

“Lance,” Keith says, voice uneven. 

Lance uncurls from around Pidge to look at where Keith stands bracket by Krolia and Shiro. Krolia’s got a hand on his arm as she watches Lance with thoughtful eyes. Shiro stands with a hand on Keith’s shoulder looking at Lance with an impossibly sad expression. And what parent waits for Shiro, Lance wonders suddenly. He feels a stab of shame go all through him. What guardian longs for Shiro’s return or is there even one? He wonders for just how long has Keith been Shiro’s entire universe. _You’re not the only orphan,_ he’d mocked Keith. Well, and so he isn’t. Who does Shiro wish was there to comfort him in the long night? Lance doesn’t know, he’s never asked. He’s a profound shithead.

Pidge shoves herself between Lance and Keith, shoulders hiking up around her ears. “Go after Allura,” she tells him. “I’ll handle this.”

“Pidge,” Lance starts.

Pidge whips around and drags his head back down so she can press her forehead against his again. He almost feels like she’s trying to physically press her thoughts into his head and for a second, he wishes they shared a lion. He closes his eyes and sighs. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs again.

“Stop making messes for me to clean up,” she replies, and head butts him gently. “Go.”

Lance absconds.

It doesn’t take him long to find Allura. It’s like he’s got some internal compass with its north permanently glued to one Princess Allura, formerly of Altea. Shit is pathetic, he’ll own it.

She’s standing on the edge of a pool so clear that even from the brush line he can see the long, slender fish dart in and out of the shadows. Allura doesn’t say anything when he walks up to stand beside her. She’s tall and slender and so maudlin sad that it’s like she’s stepped out of one of the Victorian romances he was forced to read in high school. He puts a hand on her shoulder and shoves her into the lake as hard as he can.

Allura comes up sputtering and swearing hard enough that it should, by all rights, singe the eyebrows right off his face.

“Sup,” he says, trying for cool and probably coming off ‘douche,’ but oh well. Allura wades her way towards him, fire in her eyes and her hair a sodden, bedraggled mass down her back. “Looked like you needed some help making the jump, and,” he does a little bow, grinning so wide he’s pretty sure it’s meeting up around the back of his head like a demented zipper, “I’m a helper.”

“You’re _dead_ ,” she growls and lunges.

He laughs and skips backwards, but the mud under him squelches at just the wrong time and he falls ass over kettle. Allura is there in flash, hauling him bodily into the lake while he flails and swears and cackles like a setting hen. She heaves him and he hits the water on a giggle. It’s shockingly cold in a way that races up his teeth and makes them ache. When he comes up sputtering Allura grabs him in a headlock and drags him under again.

They shove each other until he swims out into the deeps to duck under and grab at her ankles. She kicks him square in the jaw and he’s going to have a glorious bruise from it. When he comes up clutching at his face and groaning, she’s all sweet contrition and soft hands until he grabs her dunks her under again.

The water dances around them as they splash each other and laugh like the war hasn’t ever touched them. 

Allura gets him with a face full of shockingly blue mud, smearing it across his cheeks like warpaint. He threads the bobbing lily-like flowers growing in the shallows through her hair when they finally haul themselves to shore. And they collapse at the water’s edge, sore and laughing.

Hunk’s waiting for them, sprawled on a huge mushroom looking thing like the caterpillar from _Alice in Wonderland_. When Lance tells him this Hunk rolls his eyes. “Sadly,” Hunk says. “I have neither opium nor a magic solution to the mess we find ourselves in.”

“That’s a pity,” Allura sighs. She wrings her hair out with both hands until Hunk tuts at her and throws her one of the emergency blankets they’d found stashed in the lions. “But magic did get us into this mess, so perhaps we shouldn’t rely on it so much.”

The seeping bitterness in her tone makes Hunk raise an eyebrow at Lance. He shrugs and grimaces just a little in response. Allura swats him.

“Stop that,” she says.

“Stop what?” he complains, and huddles up to Hunk, letting him roughly buff him dry with a blanket. “I didn’t say anything.”

Allura makes a face at the pair of them. “You two are having your silent best friend conversations about me,” she says. “I can feel it.”

Lance and Hunk share a look. 

“That!” Allura says, pointing between the two of them. “Just like that.”

Hunk gives a little shrug as he continues to rub at Lance’s hair, hauling him around when Lance tries to squirm free. “Can’t help it, Princess,” Hunk says. “I’ve known this idiot for too long.”

“You make it sound like such a bad thing,” Lance whines. “I am a joy, a delight, a—”

“Complete disaster,” Hunk finishes, and tucks the blanket around him. “I’m going to guess the water fight was your idea?”

“Maybe,” Lance admits, drawing out the word obnoxiously. Hunk rolls his eyes. Lance gestures expressively at Allura who watches the pair of them with open amusement. She giggles when Hunk cocks his head to consider her skeptically.

“You realize you’re gonna smell like river and mud until we can find another inhabited planet that doesn’t have people who want to shoot us on it, right?” Hunk asks.

“Enh,” Lance says with a shrug and a quick look at Allura who beams at him. “Worth it.”

“You say that now,” Hunk tells him. “But just wait until you develop some horrible rash, or have space-leeches, or die of sepsis.”

“Kinda zero to a thousand there on the consequences, buddy,” Lance says. 

Hunk mutters something about co-joined forces of stupidity and event horizons that is frankly untrue and hurtful. Lance tunes him out entirely in favor of focusing on Allura. 

She’s got the blanket wrapped around her and squirms in a manner that he finds suspicious and alarming. With a couple of quick, twitching movements like Harry Houdini freeing himself of chains upside down and underwater, Allura produces the top of her undersuit and Lance gets a brief glimpse of the smooth brown skin of delicate collarbones before he snaps his head around to stare out over the lake.

“So, uh,” he says, all suave and debonair. “We’ll just go back to camp first then. Let people know things are all good. Right? Right.” He coughs awkwardly. “Just gonna be going now.”

“Oh, Lance,” Allura says with a horrible little giggle lurking in her tone. “I do hope I have not committed an inadvertent cultural misstep. That would be terribly embarrassing.”

When Lance looks back she’s grinning at him with her dimples and her fangs showing. He thinks she looks a little pink around the ears, but he’s got precisely zero ground to stand on to call her on it. She also looks smug as all fuck. 

Hunk sighs at them. Loudly. “We’re going back,” he says firmly and grabs Lance by the shoulder. “Take your time, Princess.”

She gives them a little finger wave as Hunk hauls him past her through the underbrush muttering under his breath the entire way.

Keith’s pacing at the edge of camp when they get back. His head snaps up when they come through the underbrush like a pair of loud but ineffective weed whackers. His nose wrinkles when they get close to him and he blinks like his eyes are watering. “You smell like a bog.”

“Jumped in a pond,” Lance says easily while Hunk rolls his eyes so hard its almost audible. He stops right in front of Keith and grins, petty as hell, when Keith backs up and makes an abortive gesture at his nose. “Right. So. I was an asshole. Sorry about that. I’d say I’ll never do it again, but it’s me and we both know being a jackass is, like, baked into my mitochondria.” He gives Keith a little salute. “I’ll just put myself on potato peeling duty as punishment, Brave Leader, and be off.”

“Lance,” Keith sighs, but Lance is already brushing past him.

“Gotta go try to clean the bog smell off,” he says as he walks backwards towards Red. “Good talk!”

Keith tries to make a grab for him, but Hunk stops him, shaking his head and talking fast and quiet. Lance can’t hear what Hunk’s saying, but Keith stops trying to pull free after a couple seconds, head tipped low and close to Hunk’s while he talks. He spins on one heel and keeps walking towards Red. 

Shiro’s leaning on one of her paws so Lance redirects abruptly to Blue, sending her a burst of pleading, and she obligingly lowers her massive head with a mental huff. Whatever. Lance doesn’t have it in him to be serious and emotionally honest after the severe levels of emotional whiplash he’s given himself today—honestly, he’s surprised he hasn’t knocked himself out with the g-force of his pivots. He’ll deal with whatever lecture Shiro’s got lined up at another time.

Lance is up Blue’s ramp before Shiro can leverage himself off Red’s paw and hitting the door lock. He feels vaguely bad about basically shutting the door in Shiro’s face, but he figures with the number of times Keith has stomped off in a fit of emotions the man is probably used to it. 

Allura finds him hours later, spread eagle on the floor of Blue’s cockpit just listening to her hum like the waves crashing on a distant shore.

She drops down next to him and pokes his nose. “Stealing my lion?”

“What? A man can’t be friendly with his exes,” he wants to know. 

Allura makes a non-committal noise in the back of her throat as she settles next to him. Neither of them mentions how she looks a little red around the eyes, mouth pulled tight by tension. Navigating any sort of relationship with Keith is so far from his skill set it might as well be a permanently locked class perk. All he can do is maybe run interference sometimes.

“I don’t think you and Blue are exes, precisely,” she says after a time. “I am almost entirely certain that the lion bond doesn’t work like that.”

He tilts his head to look at her. “How does it work, then,” he asks—and it’s an honest question, not something to stall for time while his lizard brain comes up with some sort of bullshit to bail him out. “I don’t think you ever really explained.”

Allura slots her fingers together and then pushes them away from herself with a sound like biting down on a mouthful of ice. He winces, and she snickers. “Honestly,” she says. “I don’t know.”

Lance presses his hands to face and laughs. “Of course, you don’t. I should have seen that one coming.”

Allura sighs and curls in on herself. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs lowly, like she’s trying to not even say the words, but they find their way out anyway. “I thought I knew, but. Well.”

“Flying a lion isn’t like just commanding them?” Lance offers with a grin. Blue huffs in his head—she has her paladins well-trained, thank you very much. No one _commands_ her.

Allura pokes him in the side. “Jerk,” she says. “No. Even after I started piloting Blue”—and Lance notices with a small, pleased smile, that she pets Blue’s cockpit floor like a cat—“I thought I understood the flow of quintessence and how they matched each paladin. But after Oriande….”

She trails off and looks pensive.

“Learned something in magic fairytale land?” Lance asks with just enough flippancy to let her eel out of that topic if she wants.

“Yes,” she says and Lance blinks. When she pulls in a long, slow breath he hauls himself into a messy cross-legged seat. Something anxious and curious blooms in his chest and he finds himself leaning into her. “The flow of quintessence the universe is like a vast river,” she spreads her fingers in front of her, tilting them so the tips touch and he cocks his head like he can some how see whatever it is she sees between them, “with everything connected like capillaries or breath, and it pools together to move slow and steady through universe. Or that’s what I was taught at least.”

She balls her hands into fists and then drops them on her knees. “In Oriande I saw that quintessence is like a, um, like a vast net between this reality and the next.” She makes a face. “It’s a domain unto itself that sometimes leaks into this space, or has small strands trickling through, like fissures.”

Lance can feel his expression twist. This is definitely not in his wheelhouse. “It’s like the difference between the Force and, what, a really complicated energy grid?”

Allura laughs. “You know that we exist within three dimensions, right?”

He gives her a very flat look.

“Right, um, so. When I used to open wormholes what I was doing was connecting to the fourth dimension of hyperspace to collapse the skein of this universe’s hypersphere to, essentially, transpose matter.” She takes a thread from who knows where—really, he should teach her magic tricks, she’s so good at slight-of-hand—and takes two ends and then pushes them together before pulling them apart. “Like so. Quintessence exists as an energetic domain between the skeins of the hyperspheres of different universes.”

Lance moves his hand over his head a couple of times. “That was the point, Princess,” he says. “Going right over my head. What does this have to do with the lions?”

She laughs. “I think the point goes over my head as well,” she admits. “But if quintessence is part of a fifth dimensional energy grid that we can connect to via hyperspace, then the specific type or amount of quintessence does not matter,” she pulls in a deep breath. “What matters is how that quintessence is _accessed_.”

A light bulb goes off like an electrical circuit being completed and he winces. “So Lotor…”

“Yes,” Allura sighs. “It makes what he did even worse—to use a living creature as a constant skein-tear…,” Allura shudders for a moment before recovering herself. “And potentially far more destructive not just to our universe—but to the simple possibility of any universe.”

“Okay, so we keep finding new ways that Lotor was, uh,” Lance tries to find a tactful way of phrasing it and gives up. “Kinda crazy, but what does that have to do with the lions.”

Allura shakes herself. “Oh! Right, of course. So what matters with the lions is not how much quintessence you naturally have—because all beings, living or dead, connect to grid in some manner—it is how you make possible that connection with your lion that matters.”

“Uh,” Lance says intelligently.

Allura waves a hand. “There is something specific to the Paladins of Voltron that allows the Lions to connect directly to the quintessence net flowing across the hypersphere and that connectivity is unique to each.” She shrugs. “I think that is why different paladins access different abilities with their lions.”

“Huh,” Lance says with impressive eloquence. She pokes him.

“So,” she says, and the way she looks at him makes him think she can look straight inside his head (not that there’s much to see in there anyway). “No paladin is the same, no bond is the same, and thus, no paladin can be replaced.”

He looks away from her suddenly earnest expression. “If you say so, Princess.”

She tangles her fingers in his hair and tugs gently. “You are not nearly as subtle as you like to think,” she says quietly.

There’s no good way to respond to that, so he just shrugs. “No one ever is.”

///

“…the _telos_ remains inaccessible because it is inconceivable, and inconceivable, because it is self- _contradictory_. Inaccessibility would then have an altogether different sense, that of an interdictive bar in the of friendship.”  
\--Derrida, _The Politics of Friendship_

Lance is hanging upside down trying scrape some sort of orange barnacle things off Red while she bitches up a storm inside his head reminding him of nothing so much as a cat that’s got tape stuck to it’s paws and blames the world at large for it when Keith finally corners him. Honestly, he should have seen this one coming, but he’s annoyed anyway.

“Lance,” Keith calls. 

He’s debating pretending like he can’t hear anything over the sound of the industrial sander-slash-flamethrower gadget Hunk’d rigged up (and honestly his best friend is _the coolest_ because not only does he think up toys like this, he lets Lance _play with them_ ) when one of the little barnacles suddenly inflates to twice it size and explodes all over him. 

There is no profanity in any language he knows sufficient to deal with the outrage. 

Keith makes an odd sputtering noise. Lance twists around to stare down at him, incredulous at the indignity, and he’s treated to the sight of their fearless leader blinking up at him before dissolving into full on guffaws. Head back, hands on stomach, _howling_ and Lance would be more offended but he’s dripping strange alien fluid and not in the sexy way. He’s self-aware enough to recognize if their positions were reversed he’d be literally rolling on the ground.

“I hate you,” he says conversationally as he lets the belay go until hits the stopper knot. The sound of the rope drag is a high, hissing scream that runs a shiver of unease up his spine. 

“I’ll go alert the presses,” Keith responds once he’s got himself together. Lance flicks barnacle goop at him. Keith, naturally, avoids it like the space ninja he is and grins at him. Which is disconcerting, Lance isn’t going to lie.

“Is there something that you need, fearless leader,” Lance says while Red rumbles away in his head, displeased he’s stopped cleaning her. (Apparently these barnacle things feel _nasty_ and Red is only too happy to share the feeling.) “Because I need to go check with Pidge that this shit won’t, like, eat my armour right off or something and then finish cleaning your space cat.”

Keith gets an odd constipated expression on his face. “She’s not my lion.”

Lance drops everything he’s doing to put his hands on his hips and just stares at Keith with one eyebrow slowly raising. Keith squirms under his flat look. As he should, Lance’d learned the technique from his mama and he’s worked hard to perfect it. “Uh- _huh_ ,” he says. “Sure.”

“You might have noticed me piloting a big, black lion,” Keith says. “You know, the one with the great big wings?”

“Seriously,” Lance replies. “This is going to be the song and dance we do?” Keith just looks at him all flat and tired and generally done with his shit, which, hah, joke’s on him because Lance has so much more shit to spread around. Lance sighs. “You’re piloting Black until we can get the Holt wonder siblings plus Hunk to build Shiro a new arm that doesn’t make him crazy and then you’ll come back to Red and things will be all right and balanced in the universe.” 

Keith opens up his mouth, probably to argue, and Lance beats him to the punch with: “She misses you, you know.”

Red presses a feeling of irritation at him. She doesn’t require any mediators; particularly not any small, fragile, mortal ones. He tells her to chill with a mental eyeroll and she huffs at him.

Keith watches him with an expression he can’t read. “Is this the math conversation again?”

Lance blinks because he’s honestly not sure when he’s ever had civil conversation with Keith much less one about mathematics. A memory twigs at him and Red helpfully shuffles it to the front for him. “Oh,” Lance says. “Yeah, you said to leave it to Pidge.” Lance shrugs expressively. “So, I brought it to Pidge.”

He lets the implication hang there and Keith narrows his eyes. “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

Lance turns to Red. “What is it with everyone assuming that I’m going to do something stupid?” He asks her. “It’s a theme I’d like us to collectively move away from, thanks.”

Red reminds him that there are _barnacles_ on her _belly_ and she’s going to fuck with the temperature controls while he tries to sleep if he doesn’t do something about them. Now.

“If you want us to move on from the theme,” Keith says conversationally. “Stop doing stupid shit.”

Lance makes a face at him. “Are you absolutely certain this is where you want to go, Mr. Let’s Charge Them Face First? Which one of us decided to one-vs-one Zarkon in an honour duel and then get his ass kicked? Which one us decided to try to pawn-sacrifice _Allura_ , the only one who can open wormholes, like, three fucking times? Oh hey! Was it me that decided to fuck off to the Blade and leave a bunch of refugees hanging? No! No, it was not.”

They glare at each other for a long while until a bit of splattered barnacle drops off his shoulder and hits the ground with a loud splat. Totally ruining the moment, negative ten to dramatic stand-off, Lance has to admit.

Keith sighs and looks away before pressing two fingers to his temple. “Are you trying to be such an enormous asshole that I’ll just give up trying to talk to you like a civilized human being?”

“I don’t know,” Lance says, squinting at him. “Is it working?”

“No,” Keith says flatly.

“Then, no,” Lance replies. “This is my naturally effervescent personality and if you don’t like it you can fuck along off and bother someone else.”

“I am _trying_ to apologize to you, you incredible _jackass_ ,” Keith says.

That draws Lance up short and he blinks. “For what?”

Keith looks at him like there’s a joke getting told that he doesn’t get but expects to have explained forthwith. They stare at each other for a long moment. “For, uh,” Keith says slowly. “Calling you useless?”

Lance shrugs. “New thing,” he says shortly. “I’m trying not to get pissed off about the truth.”

Keith makes a low snarling noise in the back of his throat and glares at him. “I can’t tell,” he says slowly. “If you are being deliberately obtuse or if you really think that.”

“Well,” Lance tells him as snide as he can make himself—which is, he’d like to point out, pretty damned snide. “I can tell you that you shouldn’t quit your day job to be a shrink because your bedside manner _sucks_.”

Keith scrubs a hand over his face. “I am going to kill you,” he says lowly.

“Uh-huh,” Lance says all slow and thoughtful. “That would be one way of solving the math problem.”

Keith takes a long, slow breath like he’s counting out each second. “Why are you like this?”

Lance gives him a slit-eyed look. “Do you want this list chronologically or by order of significance?”

“I am _trying_ to _apologize_ , you unbelievable asshole,” Keith repeats, his voice low and intensely frustrated. 

“Did Shiro put you up to this?” Lance wants to know. Because really that’s the only way any of this makes any sense.

“Can’t I just try to get along with you?” Keith demands.

“No,” Lance says easily, shaking his head. “You’re a pod person.”

They both wince in tandem once those words sink in and Keith gives him a Look, which, yeah okay Lance deserves that one. Lance coughs and shrugs. “Yeah, okay, my bad,” he says, and Keith rolls his eyes. “Look, totally unnecessary apology accepted, now will you go away?” Lance shakes his arms at him, sending little bits of exploded barnacle flying and Keith dancing away from him with a snicker. “I’m kinda dripping alien guts everywhere and your cat won’t stop bitching about how they’re stuck to her belly.”

“She’s not said anything to me,” Keith says all quiet and intent.

Lance shrugs at him and flaps a hand dismissively. “Yeah,” he says with an eyeroll. “You’re the fearless leader again. Can’t have you doing the grunt work. She probably figured that not even I can fuck up cleaning barnacles. More fool her, because I can fuck up anything.” Lance shakes his arms for emphasis and Keith looks like he’s praying to any deity that will listen for patience. “Now if you don’t mind, I really should get Pidge to analyze this … stuff. I’d like to stop looking like a bukkake star.”

Keith gives a little cough like he really, really wants to laugh at him but that would be beneath his dignity. Lance is kinda glad he doesn’t have any sort of dignity to speak of because he can laugh at anything. Keith makes a little gesture like he’s ushering someone forward—its so weird and sarcastic that Lance can only eyeball him for a long moment. Keith grins at him, wholly unflustered. “I’m not stopping you.”

“I am going to smear this shit all over you like Slimer,” Lance tells him seriously as he primly puts away his gear. “Just grab you and smear alien guts all over you and we can both be in this hell.”

He’s not expecting Keith to follow him looking all thoughtful. “It wouldn’t be the first time I was covered in alien guts,” Keith says. Lance pauses to stare at him until Keith tips his head to the side. “What’s a Slimer?”

Lance waves a finger at him. “This you fucking with me. I know it. I resent it and I’m not going to bother with a response because you know what you’ve done.”

That gets him an innocent smile as Keith trails after him and Lance has no idea which direction is up with this conversation any more so he’s just going to ignore it until the universe decides to make some sort of sense again.

“Pidgeon,” Lance says as he stops in front her. “I need your help.”

Pidge considers him for a long time over her glasses and then raises one eyebrow. “You know, I didn’t expect you to go straight to ‘alien porno’ as your alternative career path, but I applaud you on taking the initiative.”

Lance shakes his arms at her, spraying alien guts everywhere. “Less mocking me for being an unwilling bukkake star and more helping me get this shit off me.”

“Oh wow,” Pidge says in a tone so dry it could cause instant desertification of a water world. “They didn’t even get your consent? _Rude._ ”

“I know,” Lance whines. “What kind of boy do they think I am? I expect candles and romance if facials are in my sexual future.”

Pidge carefully scrapes a bit of goo off him. “Flyboy, don’t start,” she says while shaking out the test tube. “We all know you’re a slut.”

Lance presses a hand to chest and gives her a deeply offended look. “This is libel. You malign me. You—”

“Slander,” Keith interrupts.

“What?” Lance asks, blinking.

Keith rocks back on his heels, watching him and Pidge with something thoughtful in his eyes like he’s working out a puzzle he’s never seen before. “She’s slandering you since it’s verbal. It’d only be libel if she wrote it down and published it.”

“Do newsletters count?” Pidge asks, a slow, evil smile blooming across her little face. “I’m pretty sure I could set up some sort of intergalactic blog for rebels or something.”

Lance points between them. “No!” He says loudly. “No encouraging her.”

“Yes,” Keith says without giving any indication that he’s heard Lance at all. “But the truth is an absolute defense against defamation charges.” He gives Pidge a thoughtful look. “Could you actually set up some sort of messaging system between us, the rebels, and the Blade?”

“Hah!” Pidge says at the same time, point at Lance. “You know you’re a fuckboy, suck it! And, yeah, maybe, but the problem has to do with authentication, two-way encryption, and actually getting everyone to agree on the same cryptographic protocols.” Pidge waves a swab at him. “The Blade are actually the worst about that, by the way.”

Keith grimaces. “I know, I know.”

“Okay, not that the technobabble geekery isn’t fascinating and all,” Lance says, “But this stuff is starting to dry and Red has not stopped bitching yet about the barnacles so, uh, help.”

Pidge sighs as she eyes him with proprietary dismay. “I would ask how you got yourself into this mess. But it’s you. Only you would find a way to end up a non-con bukkake centerfold while cleaning his lion.” She waves Keith away. “Go be leader-ly or something while I sort out my pet idiot.”

“ _Pet!_ ” Lance squawks.

“I like how you don’t argue the idiot part,” Pidge tells him as she drags him off.

///

 _“amor enim, ex quo amicitia nominata est...”_  
\--Cicero, _Laelius on Friendship_

Lance hikes his rifle to his shoulder and uses the scope to scan the tree line. Again.

Red rumbles in his head like a volcano about to blow, grumbling about small, fragile pilots who should know their limits and _sleep_ when she tells him to sleep. And, really, he’d like to go to sleep and just drop into the soft oblivion a REM cycle for a while, but directionless anxiety jitters through his system like he’d decided to mainline six expressos and then do an amphetamine chaser. He’s a high-strung, tightly wired mess of nerves and directionless paranoia and he knows it.

Blowing out a sigh he rests his sniper rifle across his knees and pulls the thin emergency blanket tighter around himself. The air is still and humid and an uncomfortable line of sweat trickles down his back. This is definitely his least favorite pitstop of their little impromptu space road trip by far, and he includes the planet with the projectile jizz barnacles. 

But from his perch between Red’s ears he can see the entire perimeter of the camp from the little nest Shiro and Keith have made between Black’s paws to where Allura lies stretched out in front of the fire, her hair a glittering sweep of silver in the faint light of the moons. She lies curled on her side, her arm flung out to Pidge who has both hands wrapped around Allura’s wrist in her sleep. Hunk’s sprawled on his back on her other side and even all the way on top of Red he can hear Hunk’s rattling snores.

He can see everything he needs to see but it doesn’t stop the creeping feeling that he’s missing something. 

Red goes oddly silent in his head and he blinks. He’d gotten so used to her background grumbling about his willful disregard for his own wellbeing that the sudden emptiness in his head is jarring.

“Finally given up?” He whispers to her. 

Red’s response is sly and about 87% smug and accelerating. 

Lance’s head snaps up to scan the camp. “Don’t you dare,” he whispers, and then groans as he watches Keith carefully untangle himself from Shiro (who seems determined to imitate an octopus despite the entire missing limb thing) and his space wolf. “You _bitch_.”

She just purrs inside his head, smug and pleased with herself. If it works for Blue, then it works for her.

Lance thinks about slipping down Red’s side and slinking off somewhere else, but, dammit, she really does have the best vantage point. While he’s deliberating Keith looks up and points at him, expression firm. Lance sighs, nods, and resigns himself to a Leader-ly Lecture with a Keith accent.

Keith scales Red like a particularly zippy space spider, hauling himself on top her head without even a grunt of effort.

“Sup,” Lance says, and he can’t keep the exhaustion out of his voice. “Out for a midnight constitutional? Or just here the view?”

“Maybe you should take a constitutional,” Keith says as he settles next to him. “Do a double time jog around the camp since you have the constitution of dead fish. What is that, your dump stat?”

Lance stares at him for a long moment and then just sputters out a disbelieving laugh. “I’m not sure what’s weirder,” he says after a while. “The entire ‘Shiro is a clone and we missed it’ or the fact that you have a sense of humor.”

Keith just gives him a Look.

He nods, all thoughtful, “right, the fact that you have a sense of humor.”

“Fuck off.”

“ _You_ fuck off.”

Keith makes to stand, and Lance grabs him and hauls him back down. “Jesus, fuck, get back here,” he says. “If you leave Red will start bitching up a storm again and I can’t deal with that anymore.”

They sit in surprisingly companionable silence as the jungle making odd, alien sounds. Keith says nothing about the way he periodically sights down his scope to scan the perimeter. And he says nothing about the way Keith tenses at odd times, hand fluttering to his space knife.

“Nightmares?” Keith asks after a while.

Lance coughs out a sad little sound that wants to be laugh when it grows up. “Yeah. Obviously. What else is fucking new?”

Keith just looks at him all solemn and steady until Lance sighs. He waves a hand at the still camp. “I don’t normally sit up here like some kind of creep. Just. Just fucking sometimes….” He curls in on himself and stares down hard where the rest of the team lays dreaming. Allura’s hair gleams in the darkness like a brand. “Sometimes you just need to stick yourself where you can see all comers. You need to stick yourself between them and the rest of the entire _fucking_ universe.”

Keith follows his gaze and nods that slow, solemn nod before turning his head a little. Lance knows he’s watching Shiro’s huddled form. Lance hopes Shiro sleeping better these days, but he doubts it.

“Yeah,” Keith sighs. “I get it.”

They’re quiet for a long time as the night drags on, hot and humid, and Red sighs around them.

Keith pulls his knees up and rests his cheek against them as he considers Lance. It’s so disconcertingly similar to Allura’s favorite pose that Lance blinks at him. “What?” Lance bites out, more defensive than he intends. “I know I’m pretty and all but staring at me dreamily is a little off putting, not going to lie.”

“Have you told her?” Keith asks out of the fucking blue because he’s still basically feral and has never learned that you can’t just come out and say shit like that.

“Shut up,” Lance says flatly. “I mean it.” He jerks his hand through the air, drawing a sharp line. “Do not go past this point. Your first and only warning.”

Keith makes a low thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “I would have thought you’d have a million ideas for the ‘perfect date’ all planned out and ready to describe to anyone who looked like they gave even a modicum of a shit.”

He says ‘perfect date’ with finger quotes that are frankly insulting. Lance shoves him, and Keith laughs softly.

“Fuck _entirely_ off,” Lance tells him. Keith raises an eyebrow and waits. Apparently two years living on a space whale with his mom taught him patience. After a while Lance squirms uncomfortably. 

“Ugh,” Lance says eloquently. “No. And I’m not going to. She doesn’t need that shit right now. Maybe not ever.”

Keith turns his head, so his chin is propped up on his knees and he stares out into the dark. “She’d miss you,” he says, because he’s still a jackass with no sense of timing. “If you suddenly disappeared.”

“Subtle,” Lance tells him. 

“Weren’t you the one telling me not to quit my day job to become a shrink?” Keith asks, and Lance can hear the smile in his voice. 

“And I stand by that,” Lance says. “Because you are still a jackass.”

Keith waves a hand between them. “Pot, this is kettle, calling to tell you that you are maybe, just maybe, black.”

“Speaking of dates,” Lance says, only a little desperate to change the subject. “When should I be marking down my calendar for the wedding? Have you picked out rings yet? I bet Shiro would like a nice infinity band. My sister is a jeweler, I’ll hook you up.”

He’s treated with the frankly hilarious picture of Keith-I-am-an-actual-facts-action-hero-Kogane going a bright and brilliant red around the ears. He’s kinda looking forward to the inevitable explosion of profanity and maybe Keith stomping off in a huff like old times, but Keith just turns his face firmly into his knees and says, voice all soft and squashed. “You really think he’d like a ring?”

Lance sputters out a laugh and just _stares_. He could dine out on this for the rest of his entire existence. But he grabs the impulse to tease and throttles it. 

“You have met Shiro, right?” Lance asks, and Keith makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat without looking up. “You could give him a poprock ring on a string and he’d treat it like the crown jewels. Shit. Don’t actually do that—I mean, it could be all romantic and cute for another couple if it’s a lead up to, you know, the actual ring. But Shiro’s been pining for so long I think he might actual expire if you did that and we’ve all had enough expiring Shiro’s for the rest of, I don’t know, the far side of forever.”

Keith finally looks at him, and his expression is such a complicated mess of longing, despair, and confusion that Lance takes pity on his dumb ass.

“Oh, holy shit,” he sighs. “You are actually useless.”

Keith glares at him.

“Have you never actually,” Lance starts and then heaves a sigh when Keith glares harder. “Okay. Look, this is what you do when we get to Earth. You are going to figure out, with Hunk’s help, how to chip off a little bit of that big honking diamond that was the Castle. Then you and I are going to see my sister and we are going to get rings made. And then _your_ dumb ass is going to take _his_ dumb ass somewhere far away from the beach—go walk the boardwalk or something like dumb tourists—so that me and Hunk can set up something romantic. With candles. Then you are going to bring your dumb asses back to the beach and have the best dinner that Hunk can possibly cook. And while you sit there feeding him bits of brazo de gitano under the stars listening to the waves you will look him in the eyes and ask him to marry you and we can all breath a big sigh of relief that you two have finally gotten over your mutual idiocy and Pidge didn’t actually have to lock you two in a closet.”

Lance sucks in a breath and glares at Keith, daring him to argue.

“You have that alarmingly well planned out,” Keith says quietly.

“You and Shiro have been stupid about each other for a long time,” Lance says stiffly. “I’ve had some time.”

“You sure you don’t want to do this with—”

“Line,” Lance barks. “You’re crossing it.”

Keith looks at him for a while longer, still kinda pink, and then he smiles. “Are you _sure_ you don’t want Allura—”

“I will kill you,” Lance promises. “I might have to wait until your back is turned and you’re fifty miles away, so I can snipe your ass. But I will kill you.”

Keith puts up both hands in surrender. 

Lance sighs. “Look, man. He loves you. He’s probably loved you for a stupidly long time. You literally went to the ends of the universe for him. Just marry him so that at least someone on this team can have the epic fantasy romance and I can live vicariously through you.”

Keith gives him a narrow-eyed speculative look. “Does this mean you’re going to try to plan our wedding?”

“ _Try_ , hell.”

///

 _Ich und Mich sin dimmer su eifrig im Gespräche: wi wäre es auzuhalten, wenn es nicht einen Freund gäbe?_  
\--Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_

Lance watches Shiro carefully lever himself to the ground between Black’s paws with the help of Keith’s space wolf (named ‘Blink’ of all things, better than ‘Wolf,’ Lance supposes) and breathes out on a four count. Nothing to be nervous about here. Just going to go talk to the man that he has epically and catastrophically failed in every way it is possible to fail another person. No big.

He scrubs a hand over his face and groans.

When he drops his hands Shiro’s watching him with an amused little smile. Shiro lifts his hand (his only hand and oh G-d that makes things twist uncomfortably in his gut) and crooks his fingers in the universal ‘come here’ gesture. 

Lance goes.

“So now you’re willing to talk to me,” Shiro says mildly. Lance’s eyes snap to his face and he can feel all the blood drain out of his face. But Shiro still has that faintly amused smile and not a spec of recrimination in his expression. “I was wondering when you would.”

Lance winces before he can stop himself. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. He rubs the back of his wrist across his mouth and stares hard at Shiro’s boots before looking up. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I’ve been an avoidant asshole because if there’s one thing I really don’t deal well with it’s admitting my own mistakes and I have really, spectacularly fucked up.”

Shiro cocks his head and his smile goes a little crooked. “Lance…”

“No,” he interrupts and waves his hands like he could wipe out the words between them. “Let me do this.”

Shiro subsides. 

Lance draws in a deep breath. “You tried to tell me,” Lance says slowly. “You tried to tell me something was wrong on the astral plane, but I let it go. I brought it up and you said you were _fine_ and I didn’t push but I should have.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Shiro says softly.

Lance glares. “Yes, I could have,” he barks and both of Shiro’s eyebrows go up. “There were things, little things, that were off. But I …,” Lance looks away and can feel his face twist. “I needed you to be, well, you. Or the you that you were in my head—you know, all heroic and knowing what to do all the time.”

Shiro’s expression crumples. “Lance.”

Lance jerks a hand through the air. “It was dumb, and it was childish. Allura said something was wrong with you and I blew her off. I should have _listened_.” He runs his hands through his hair and laughs. “You, the other you, came to me and said that you felt like something was wrong. That you didn’t feel _right_ and I told you that you probably just needed more _oxygen_. If I had listened then maybe we could have helped—gotten Haggar out of your head. I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Lance says and drops his hands. “I fucked up.”

Shiro stares at him for a long time. So long that Lance squirms uncomfortably. 

“You don’t have to accept my apology,” he starts.

“I’ll accept,” Shiro says quietly. “But I have a condition.”

Lance blinks, suddenly unsure. “Okay?”

Shiro smooths his hand down the back of Keith’s space wolf and just looks at Lance with an odd thoughtful expression. “I want you to promise to come talk to me,” he says slowly as if thinking through each word. “Before you make any decisions when we get back to Earth.”

Lance makes a face. “Lions,” he says with as much offended dignity as he can muster. “Are terrible tattletales.”

Shiro blinks. “Lions? No, Allura is worried, and she still talks to me.”

And that? That’s a thing Lance doesn’t know how to deal with. He sits down in the dirt right in front of Shiro and everything with big, big eyes. “Uh?”

There’s a really alarming twinkle in Shiro’s eyes as his nose goes up and his voice goes all Victorian prim: “I don’t reveal confidences.”

“Huh,” Lance says intelligently. A light bulb goes off. “Well I sure as shit do. Or at least some of them. I need a favor when we get to Earth.”

The look Shiro gives him is frankly hurtful in the depths of its distrust.

“Don’t give me that look,” Lance tells him prissily. “It’s for a good cause, but you are going to have to act clueless for a while.”

The way Shiro’s expression changes over the course of Lance’s explanation is something that he will treasure for the rest of his natural life—for however long that was going to be—and when he’s finally done Shiro blinks at him like he can’t quite believe what he’s heard.

“You have that alarmingly well planned out,” Shiro murmurs.

“Yeah,” Lance says. “Keith said the exact same thing.”

**Author's Note:**

> (1) _“o philoi, oudeis philoi”_. "Oh friends, there are no friends."
> 
> (2) _…und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal die freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt_  
>  “Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!” So rief der sterbende Weise;  
> “Freunde, es gibt keine Feind!” ruf ich, der lebend Tor.
> 
> "Perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim:  
> 'Friends, there are no friends!' thus said the dying sage;  
> 'Foes, there are no foes!!' say I, the living fool." 
> 
> (3) _“amor enim, ex quo amicitia nominata est...”_
> 
> "For love, from which friendship is named ..."
> 
> (4) _"Ich und Mich sin dimmer su eifrig im Gespräche: wi wäre es auzuhalten, wenn es nicht einen Freund gäbe?"_
> 
> "I and Me are always too earnestly in conversation with one another: how could it be endured, if there were no friend?"


End file.
